(Un)settling Ears

This short-form ethnographic sketch juxtaposes the narratives of sound, listening, and the idea of “home” from two Taiwanese “astronaut wives” who had immigrated to Toronto. Both women's daily lives were suffused with the absences of their husbands (remaining in Asia to earn money) and adult children, and both regularly shuttled trans-pacifically, and so had never fully emplace. I show their contrasting accounts of how drastically different sounds constitute Toronto for each of them, in relation to their respective sonic Taipeis. In tracing their differently (un)settling ears that destabilized both cities, I also show how such unsettlement gave them language to articulate otherwise unspeakable alienations in their seemingly heteronormative and privileged lives. In contrast to the Sound Studies' overwhelming tendency to understand listening as emplacement, by overdubbing these two narratives, I show aural ways of being that are marked by disorientations and suspension between places.